‘Yes,’ Vicky said heavily. ‘They’ve found Eva, you know. They recovered her body from the sea and brought it in today. She’d been pushed off the cliff.’
‘Oh no! How – how dreadful.’ Beatrice bent her head, putting a hand up to cover her face. ‘I – I should have gone to the police sooner. Much sooner.’
‘Yes, I think you really should.’ There was a certain grimness in Vicky’s tone, but she went on, ‘Anyway, I don’t think Harry’s going to creep up here and murder you. It would be a bit obvious, don’t you think, with all the police around?’
‘But will they still be around tonight?’ Beatrice quavered. ‘Once they’ve all gone home—’
‘Look, you lock your door, and if I hear Harry trying to break it down I promise I’ll rush up and rescue you, all right? Shall I bring you up something to eat meantime? You probably missed your lunch.’
Having persuaded Beatrice to accept her offer, Vicky went back downstairs. It was hard to be sympathetic to someone whose wilful self-deception had caused so much death and misery – not that she had any brief for Harry either. The sooner she got out of this awful place the better. Surrounded by horrors she was beginning to feel like the prisoner in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, with the walls closing in around her.
Marek Kaczka only nodded when he was told what was required, viewed Eva’s body in silence, apparently unmoved, and said, ‘Yes, is her,’ when he came out. In the office DI Strang produced the form for him to sign. ‘I need to take some details first. Age?’
It was slow work. He was fifty-six, he said. For nationality, he gave Polish, but he could give no more details. All his papers, he claimed, were held by Mr Carnegie.
‘We haven’t found anything,’ Strang said. ‘No papers, no employment records—’
Kaczka made a sound that could have been a laugh or a snort. ‘No pay,’ he said. ‘Place to stay. Food. Sometimes money for beer. Sometimes.’
It wasn’t unexpected. ‘Look, we need to talk about this. Would you like a cup of coffee, sir?’
Kaczka looked at him. ‘Why you say “sir”? To me?’
‘I’m a public servant. You are a member of the public, so I call you sir. Wait here.’ Strang wasn’t sure he understood, but when he came back with the mugs and a pack of sandwiches held between his teeth, Kaczka actually smiled as he took them.
‘Right,’ Strang said. ‘If you don’t understand what I’m saying, stop me, OK?’
‘I hear better than to speak.’
‘Fair enough. It seems Carnegie was exploiting you – you know?’
He nodded. ‘Like – slave.’
‘Was it money? Did you have to pay him back for bringing you here?’
This made him obviously uncomfortable. He shrugged.
‘Was there some reason you couldn’t just come here for a job?’
Not even a shrug, this time.
‘If you’re Polish, you have a right to come here to work.’
Kaczka didn’t meet his eyes. ‘Yes, Polish.’
‘Even if you weren’t, after being treated so badly you would have a very good chance of being allowed to stay,’ Strang suggested, but ‘Polish’ was the only answer he got.
They might have to bring in an interpreter to get this sorted out. If, say, the man had a criminal record, that might explain the hold Carnegie had over him.
He tried a new tack. ‘How did you meet Adam Carnegie?’
‘A friend. He knows.’
Strang jumped at that – people trafficking? – but got nowhere. The first sandwich was disappearing rapidly and Kaczka was using that as an excuse for not answering.
‘Tell me,’ he said conversationally, ‘do you have a family? Wife? Children?’
Kaczka stopped chewing. His eyes, so dark they were almost black, softened for a second, but only for a second. ‘Not now,’ he said.
It was often the little things, the passing comments, that got under the guard Strang had imposed on his feelings like a stiletto slipped between the ribs. His throat tightened as he heard the response he would have to give to the same question. He coughed.
‘Back at home, perhaps?’
Finishing the second sandwich, Kaczka didn’t answer.
He asked the next question more or less at random. ‘So – why did you choose to come here? It’s very remote.’
It was a comprehensive shrug this time, a shift of the shoulder with the hands outstretched, indicating a vast ignorance of anything approaching a reason. But as Strang decided to give up until they had the means of better communication and just ask him to sign the ID certificate. An idea formed in his mind.
‘Were you fond of Eva?’ he said suddenly as he held out the pen.
Kaczka took it. ‘Is nice girl,’ he said flatly, then took it to sign his name in a neat, old-fashioned copperplate.
‘It’s thanks to you we found her, you know,’ Strang said. ‘And the other girl, who disappeared before. Veruschka – did you know her?’
He was watching him carefully, but there was no sign of emotion. Kaczka laid down the pen. ‘No. Is before I am here,’ he said, then, ‘I go now?’
Strang sighed. ‘Yes. Thanks for your help, sir.’
‘And you. Sir.’ He gave an odd little bow as he left the room.
When Vicky Macdonald went into the kitchen, she saw that the door to the back premises was open and she could hear someone moving about. On edge anyway, she said sharply, ‘Hello? Who is that?’ and went to through to the back corridor.
Harry Drummond was standing there, his hand on the door of the game larder. It looked as if he’d been in the main larder too; the door to that was half open, as was the one to the old coal cellar where cleaning things were kept. He jumped, looking, she thought, like a schoolboy caught out raiding the fridge.
‘Oh – Vicky!’ he said awkwardly.
‘Did you want to get into the game larder?’ she said with polite mystification.
He reddened. ‘Oh, I was just curious. How’s the hare coming on?’
‘It’s gone. Disappeared the other day, bizarrely enough. You’d smell it if it was there.’
‘Oh?’ He didn’t seem surprised. He opened the door anyway and peered inside at the bare room, the zinc-topped shelves and the wooden pegs. ‘Yes, you’re right. It’s gone.’
He turned and went back into the kitchen, without explaining his behaviour. As he was leaving the room, Vicky said, ‘If you didn’t want to go across to the hotel tonight, I’m going to make an omelette for Beatrice so I could do one for you too, if you’d settle for that—’
‘Beatrice?’ He whirled round. ‘I thought she was in hospital. Is she back?’
‘Yes, they’ve discharged her. But she’s still not very well and she’s very tired,’ Vicky said warningly.
‘Of course, of course. Poor Beatrice,’ he said and went out, leaving Vicky still more on edge. She really wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take. Perhaps Murdo John – but no. That would create a whole other set of problems and it wouldn’t remove the ones she had already.
She heard him coming across the hall below, recognising his firm, brisk steps. He was climbing the stairs two at a time. Beatrice shrank back in her chair as his knock came on the door.
‘Beatrice, it’s Harry. How are you?’
She didn’t reply. He knocked again.
‘I know you’re there. Vicky told me you were back. Can I come in?’
He didn’t wait for an answer, but tried to open the door. She sat, shivering as she watched the handle turn this way and that. He swore under his breath, but she heard him.
‘Beatrice, this is ridiculous. I need to talk to you. I can’t go on shouting through the door. You have to let me in. It’s important.’
She could hear the temper in his voice. Perhaps she was making it worse by provoking him but she was so afraid that she didn’t think her legs would carry her across to the door.
‘You might just as well speak to me now.’ He was making an e
ffort to sound reasonable. ‘You can’t stay locked in there for ever. And the thing is, you might be able to help me save the charity. You don’t want all these poor children to have no food, no blankets because we’re stopped from helping them? Come on, Beatrice, let me in!’
The thing was, she wasn’t sure now that she wanted Human Face to survive. There were other charities, bigger charities, that might even make her money work harder. She put her fingers in her ears, but even so she could hear him battering on the door with his fists, hear him shouting, ‘Stupid, stupid bitch!’ until at last, when her heart was racing so fast she thought it might fail at any moment, his footsteps retreated down the stairs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
After all the activity of the day, the police office seemed very quiet as Kelso Strang settled down to work at his desk. The local force had returned to Broadford and Portree and the pathologist and JB would be back in Edinburgh by now. PC Murray was presumably around somewhere but she’d probably retreated to the police house at the other side of the building.
The peace was welcome. Tomorrow would be more pressured than ever, with the SOCOs back for the search of Balnasheil Lodge, room by room. The warrant request for searches of Tennant’s, Quentin Lacey’s and the Macdonalds’ residences had been turned down as speculative; irritating, but not unexpected. The work had been done already on the murder scene, though processing the information the experts had gathered would be a long job.
He clicked on the file of crime scene photographs. The forensic photographer was good at his job and Adam Carnegie’s flat leapt out at him again in minute and vivid – all too vivid – detail. He hadn’t actually seen the body; here it was sprawled across the desk, and he spent some time studying the close-up of the wound. A neat cut, as the SOCO had said, right across the artery; not a random slash. Someone knew what they were doing.
It somehow reminded him of ritual slaughter, of sacrifice, like a goat placed on an altar – the altar of primitive justice, perhaps?
Then there was the blood – the blood everywhere, browning by the time the photo had been taken. The carpet was covered with bloody paw prints, dozens of them; the dog must have traced endless frantic circles in its distress and scrabbled at both the doors. From the photographed smears on Carnegie’s trousers it had pawed at him too – trying to rouse him, perhaps, poor beast.
He’d had plenty of experience in looking at photos like these. Their professionalism had a distancing effect that certainly made it much less harrowing than visiting a crime scene itself, where even the smell was an assault. All the same, they always provoked a certain queasiness; Strang had to force himself to study them, concentrate on the story they might be telling him. That was the job.
The blow must have come from over the shoulder – right-handed, the report said. Had Carnegie been sitting down at the time, or could he have been standing by the desk and collapsed onto the chair? He wasn’t a tall man; provided he was unsuspecting and had turned away it wouldn’t be hard to draw a sharp knife across the side of his throat.
Supposing he had been sitting at the desk with his back to the person coming in, did that suggest someone familiar – Harry, say, or Vicky or Beatrice – or Marek, maybe, bringing back the dog from a walk? They’d established that he looked after it when needed. Carnegie might not even turn as one of them came in.
If it wasn’t one of the household – Quentin Lacey or Murdo John or Daniel Tennant, or even some person unknown – he would almost certainly have got up to open it – but then, too, once Carnegie had let the visitor in he might have had some reason for going to the desk, to fetch something or even to look at something handed to him, something the murderer had removed when he left.
So that hadn’t taken him very far. In any case, this sort of speculation was a waste of precious time. Establishing motive wasn’t part of the professional job; it might be useful to the prosecution to suggest a ‘why’ once the facts were known, but if the evidence of guilt was solid, proving motive was unnecessary.
The next stage of the investigation, searching the house, would be concentrating on the results of the attack on the perpetrator. He, or she, would have been behind the victim, but it was unlikely that with a severed artery pumping out blood there would be no direct evidence – hands, clothes, surely, would bear at least some traces. But in the hours of darkness it was unlikely that there would be anyone to observe them, and out here disposing of bloodstained clothes would be simple enough: a weighted bag, and they would be at the bottom of the sea as the knife most probably also was.
The searchers tomorrow would be dismantling every sink and basin in the house, looking for evidence of blood in the traps underneath, but of course days had passed now and these traces too might have found their way into the convenient ocean. They could get lucky; every successful investigation Strang had ever worked on in Edinburgh had relied on a considerable slice of luck – luck and forensics.
Forensic evidence, though, was slow, no matter how much pressure JB could bring to bear, and at the back of their minds there was, as always, dread that the killer would strike again while they waited for results. If this was in some sense an execution rather than a murder, though, surely it was less likely? Of course, even if the killer believed this was justified revenge on an Old Testament scale – an eye for an eye, a death for a death – and had no other victim in mind, killing for self-protection was still possible. Yes, there was always that fear. He shifted uneasily.
And there was also the other possibility: Carnegie and Drummond had been aware that the net was closing round them and according to Tennant the thieves had fallen out, and now Drummond was doing his best to set Carnegie up to take the rap. His death was, to say the very least, convenient. And – the unwelcome thought came to him – if Beatrice had been in some sense complicit, she might be very inconvenient too.
On the thought, Strang picked up the phone to check with the Broadford station that there was an officer on duty overnight and was reassured to know that there was. With Vicky in the house too, surely there wasn’t anything Drummond could do that wouldn’t expose him to a worse charge than money laundering? So Beatrice should be safe enough meantime. Probably.
That wasn’t good enough. They needed a breakthrough on this case, and soon.
Morally speaking, Strang was finding it a tough one. He’d thought sometimes how hard it must have been to do this job in the days when there was a hanged man on the other side of conviction, but presumably the inner dialogue was the same as the one he was conducting now; he was there to enforce the law, not approve of it.
But nailing Carnegie’s killer …Strang could raise none of the passion for serving justice he had felt on previous cases he’d worked on. The fourteen-year-old girl who’d been raped and strangled and left on wasteland by the Water of Leith – that had generated the sort of desperation to bring in the man who did it that had every one of them existing on three hours’ sleep a night and missing meals. It was all they could do for her.
This man, though? Carnegie had baited his snares with the cruel promise of freedom in the West to illegal immigrants with little hope of achieving it on their own. And being evil himself, it was looking as if he had contaminated another person and drawn them into evil too. If his executioner did escape the law, would Strang find himself haunted by it for the rest of his life? Morally speaking, probably not.
Professionally, though – ah, that was different. He hated to fail, hated it with a passion. Perhaps his father was responsible for the mixture of nature and nurture that had always made success so crucial for him, but he couldn’t help it. And if he’d cared so much in the past, he cared even more now.
He’d been confident earlier when JB had left him in charge; now, alone in the silent room, dark apart from the pool of light from the desk lamp, surveying the inadequate evidence that lay before him, he felt the first frisson of uncertainty. What if he wasn’t, after all, good enough to handle this by himself? What if he blew it, and brou
ght JB down with him?
It would be the most public of failures too, with analysis of whatever mistakes he had made – even if he hadn’t – running in the papers day after day. And worst of all would be knowing that his father would be reading them with a curled lip – his son, who couldn’t even hack it in a job as lowly as this one.
Never mind the balance of rights and wrongs. Strang was going after the killer with all the skill and energy at his command and then it would be up to others to take account of the background to the crime. He did allow himself to hope, though, that whoever it was got a brief with a talent for the eloquent plea in mitigation.
And whatever you felt about Old-Testament-style justice, you had to remember that the lands where that writ still ran were not famed for peace and freedom.
Livvy Murray put the final full stop on the report, looked at her watch and swore. She had wanted to get down to the Black Cuilli before it opened in the hope of once more being able to persuade Murdo John Macdonald to say more than he meant to, but she’d been determined to make an impeccable professional job of Harry Drummond’s statement, for her own self-respect.
He’d been slow to get the message that going off on rants, asking impassioned questions apparently directed to some person passing directly overhead and claiming loss of memory was only going to prolong things. Once the penny dropped, she’d been meticulous about limiting her questioning strictly to his movements, but she’d done it more or less minute by minute and when at last she’d finished he was looking like a lemon that had been squeezed until it was limp.
She was a fool to herself, of course. It had given her more than an hour of writing up to do and by now there would be customers in the bar to give Murdo John an excuse for ignoring her. So there was no need for hurry now; she sat back to read through Drummond’s statement.
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